How PewDiePie promoted Best Fiends, Twitch's eyeball power, and rising CPI price graphed

As is fitting for mid January, the news this week is about gearing up for the rest of 2015.

New companies are forming, others are raising new funding, while some analysts continue to look back over what can be learned from behaviours collected from 2014.

Underpinning all these are longterm trends such as virtual reality, the power of video - in terms of user acquisition, engagement and monetisation - not to forget the constantly changing publishing scene.

These, and mainly more, will be keeping us busy as we get further into Q1.

Industry voices

• Given the power of the YouTubers, Pascal Clarysse talked to Finnish developer Seriously about how it worked with PewDiePie to fire Best Fiends up the charts.
• Following the news it generated $1 million from video ads, our Stateside columnist Carter Dotson asked What can you learn from Crossy Road's smart monetization layers?
• We talk to Spil Games on its initiative to find and reboot mobile gaming's Unsung Heroes.
• Our VR expert Spanner Spencer talked to UK outfit Climax Studios on the challenge of providing the illusion of control in its VR shooter Bandit Six.
• We updated our Mobile Mavens articles with a couple of late but interesting entries on hopes and fears for 2015.

User acquisition, retention, and monetisation

• EEDAR's Patrick Walker considered the power of Twitch and concluded mobile game developers need to start talking the platform seriously.
• Meanwhile Polish tech outfit Gaming Live has its Twitch alternative in beta.
• According to numbers from Millennial Media, 35% of game devs are now using video ads.
• Following the publication of its 2014 graph, we talked to Fiksu about whether CPI costs are really rising. It demonstrated the trends with a 2013-2014 graph.
• Unity's Mika Kuusisto offered up data that found social discovery is better than app stores.
• Market analysts eMarketer predicted Facebook would consolidate its UA dominance with 1 billion monthly mobile users in 2015.

Tools & platforms

• Following its launch at Pocket Gamer Connects London 2015, we spoke to Tag Games CEO Paul Farley about his goal to empower the game development community with its open source F2P-focused ChilliWorks tools.
• China browser outfit UCWeb has decided to enter the hardware market with its Android Xiaoqi gamepad.
• Quaid Media launched its Burst TV product.
• Fortumo's new carrier-billing-focused SDK allows users to make offline in-app purchases.

Funding, acquisitions, personnel and shuttering

• Applications for Swedish Stugan game accelerator opened.
• Games Guru Tommy Palm has left King to set up VR developer Resolution.
• Storm8 hired Zynga's VP of product Pablo Paniagua.
• Glu Mobile exec Matt Ricchetti abandoned San Francisco to join Midwest developer PerBlue.
• AppsFlyer raised $20 million in a B round.
• Swedish outfit Mag Interactive has invested in upcoming UK studio Delinquent.
• UK studio nDreams announced it had raised $2.75 million to build a VR games portfolio.
• And finally Alysia Judge joined PocketGamer.biz as news editor.